you will go back to windows , now i believe fair is fair ,ok.

so a lot of ppl keep saying linux is better and stuff, so i tried linux : mandriva , mandriva powerpack , ubuntu 7.04 , ubuntu 8.04, linux xp 2006 , linux xp 2008 , and mandrake sumting , Knoppix 5.3.. and also debian .

now in comparison to xp and even vista this open source distro two main advantages (1) no need for an AV (2) GUI was really cool .... and thats where it stops !!

Linux have proven to me to be the most unstable OS i have ever used !! And , to top it off the simplest thing u need to buss yuh brain to get done e.g intenet radio , youtube etc.. the closest thing to a go distro ive used so far is ubuntu 8.04 the freeset of them all .. All the rest is either my video drivers stop working , or sum random lockups or some DOS type mode that i cant use

Is it just me or do any of you guys get problems with your linux distro's

NOTE : ive used these on 3 different pc's over the yrs !!

I have both Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows XP Professional installed on my laptop. I almost always use Windows as that is what I'm used to. However, when I need an eye-candy fix or when I feel like using the CLI I hop over to linux, as it's purty (totally beats vista. sorry.) and has an infinitely better command line environment. If you aren't used to using the command line, then linux might be a bit more intimidating. The thing about linux is that, despite what its hard-core fans claim, it's still not entirely designed for the average user. There is a certain amount of stuff that isn't obvious from the start, and you need to be willing to get your hands dirty every once in a while. I had a heck of a time getting my wireless card to work, but that was more Broadcom's fault than Ubuntu's. My wifi card uses proprietary drivers and a proprietary firmware loaded by the driver, which means that there's no open source driver for it. You end up having to use some strange method to use the windows driver in linux. In the end it works, but it's kind of a pain. Installing things like flash take more effort than they should, but some things are much easier to install, thanks to the easy package managers, such as apt-get for the command line and synaptics for the gui.

I haven't seen these stability issues you report, but it will vary from computer to computer. Linux in general can't be that unstable, since a large percentage of the web is hosted by linux servers running apache. A computer whose developers didn't make drivers for linux (or didn't make specs available for OSS developers to write their own drivers) is less likely to be stable than one whose developers are cooperative with the open source crowd. Dell is relatively linux-friendly, which may be why I don't have many problems. Intel is also fairly linux-friendly, and having an intel chipset, graphics and processor means that everything works more or less OK. I don't know much about AMD, it may work better or worse for them.

So I guess the bottom line is that if you're happy with Windows, stick with it. If you're happy with linux, stick with it. And if you're unsure about what you like, try them both out and use what works best for you.

i can relate !!
i find ubuntu 8.04 to be quite good actually , the only time this gave me problem is when i open a backdoor for udates i think it was ..... and to imagines ubuntu is free and is working better than linux xp and mandriva powerpack .. SHAME !!

I completely disagree on all but point 2. I don't use an AV on Windows either -- a little common sense goes a VERY long way. Linux has a LOT of advantages over Windows, but not needing a AV isn't really a big point at all.


Like any OS, the OS can only be as stable as the drivers for it. I've had extremely stable linux boxes before (intel chipset, intel video, etc), and very unstable ones...


I had no issues with those, but if you want a list of unnecessarily complicated things that are trivial in windows, I can elaborate.


8.04 was a step back from 7.10 as far as I'm concerned. Things worked a LOT better in the previous one, and I'm hardly the only one saying that.


Eye candy wise, Compiz Fusion truly puts Vista's Aero Glass stuff to shame. "Totally beats" is a HUGE understatement here. Aero Glass isn't really pretty (I kind of dislike it actually), doesn't really have much useful features (5% of what Compiz Fusion has perhaps?), isn't very customizable, etc.


Not true at all. People keep repeating that a lot, but it's just not the case. People usually say that merely because they don't know about the countless command line utils Windows has (e.g. net, netsh, wmic, reg, sc, tasklist, taskkill, icacls, takeown, diskpart, netstat, fsutil, mklink, powercfg, etc), mainly because they're used to click around for everything. The very few extra command line utils Linux has by default can mostly be added to Windows too (e.g. sed). And with PowerShell, Windows just might have the lead. I'll grant you that Windows badly needs a built-in SSH daemon though (CopSSH works fine for that).


Servers not even running any kind of GUI or anything, on very plain (and high quality) hardware means very little in terms of how stable a desktop is going to work, with a full GUI, so-so drivers for fancy sound & video cards and all that. Apples and oranges.

Besides, I think you (D_block) fail to bring up any of the most important issues that actually makes Linux a pain, like the totally screwed-up sound system on linux (over a dozen different systems, none of which really works great). A picture is worth a thousand words:

Ubuntu 8.04 switched from alsa to pulse audio, and that made things quite horrible as far as I'm concerned.

i dont like to make long threads !!

As i stated b4 " I " this is lil problems i was getting ... i just reinstalled ubuntu 8.04 here and having a lil better idea of how to handle this distro , i got everything working up to mark ... not bad at all

The point is , i can handle my self pretty well on a windows system, now imagine standard users who just want to browse and check mail an click pretty flashy banners that spam windows ( unknowingly to them ) using the simplest linux distro . As i remember Xp was built so a 4 yr old can operate it , who can guess the age on linux



how much other ppl use your pc either in your presence or not !! when you are the only user for your machine its different from when anone can use it

Then you were lucky or something. 8.04 is quite bad compared even to its predecessor.

I've had issues with grub (not finding ntldr or bootmgr on some NTFS partitions, complaining about disk geometry sometimes, etc), having to wget the source for alsa-driver & alsa-lib & alsa-util, decompress them, compile them, copy them over, chmod them, and then editing the alsa-base config file by hand, trying values one by one and rebooting hoping it works, and also unmuting the IEC 958 from alsa mixer in a terminal to even have sound working (all it takes in windows is checking one checkbox to get working over spdif), to having audio working only half the time (yay for pulse audio), various lockups (yay for aiglx) and heavy flickering on games (like supertux), ACPI not working as as good as it did in the previous version (which was already working worse than in XP).

A lot of the new stuff in 8.04 sucks compared to 7.10. The network manager is quite bad, the update manager saying its up to date when sometimes it isn't, they removed the tools to create network shares from the default install (install nautilus-share, then reboot, and to change workgroup name, you again have to edit the samba config file by hand), the most interesting features of compiz fusion aren't enabled by default and the app to configure it isn't installed by default either, still having to edit the x.org config file by hand (fun!) to have a nice resolution on the login screen and such, having to make use of apps like autocutsel for copy/paste in VNC to work at all between windows and linux boxes, wireless sucks (they've gotten rid of some drivers for worse ones, and it has several bugs and issues with keys), etc.

The distro upgrade likes to break a lot of things too (it broke my perfectly good openldap install, and it tends to break things like apache if it's not running). And some of the choices they made weren't so great at the time it came out, like the choice of a beta web browser (Fx 3) for which almost no extension worked (nevermind Flash crashing a lot)...

I could go on... And that's ignoring the fact it won't run Windows apps in the first place (no need to mention WINE). Since none of this is an issue on Windows, so you can guess what OS we use. I really want the Compiz Fusion eye candy and all that, but it's just not worth the time and hassle to try to get everything working, and then have it break again with the next distro upgrade. Windows "Just Works™"

As for the AV thing, my daughters had several PCs so far, and they've always been using it as local admins, without an AV and all that. No firewall either. And so far, the total virus count is of zero, and as for the spyware, also zero. The thing is:

1. they're not using IE
2. the box is patched
3. they're not blindly running any old .exe from strange places

And that's really all it takes. People who can't manage to handle point #3 on their own should have their admin rights revoked, to protect them from themselves.

Although you are right that windows has many command line tools that people are not used to using (although I have used most of those tools before), linux still feels more "natural" when it comes to the command prompt (or as they call it, the terminal). In windows (well, at least NT variants of windows), there is always some GUI there. You cannot boot Windows XP into single-user mode and get a root prompt and nothing else. The closest it comes to is Safe mode with command prompt, which still loads the GUI, just loads cmd.exe as the shell instead of explorer.exe. Also, the terminal itself feels much smoother. In GUI mode, the terminal supports copying and pasting with keyboard shortcuts (cmd.exe you can copy but there's no shortcut to paste), there are tabs, tab-completion works much better, etc. I have yet to learn PowerShell, so maybe I'll take some of this back if/when I do, but compared to linux's terminal, cmd.exe isn't very good. There are plenty of utilities for windows, but the way in which you interact with the utilities is what makes the difference.

It is true that one doesn't expressly need AV for windows, although just due to the massively larger quantity of viruses for Windows, it makes more sense to have it for windows than for linux. I have AV installed because for one, my friends send me programs they write and such which are not always as benign as they claim (we have contests to see who can pwn whose computer...) and my brothers use it, and they don't have as good of discretion when it comes to what websites to visit, etc. Not running as an admin all the time helps a lot, I have found.

So I guess I'd say linux is for some people and not for everyone. It's not 100% ready for wide-spread mainstream use, but it's getting there. And for a GUI-less server it rocks.

ATI gpu? I had my fun with that.


I really wish windows had a "one thing to rule them all" package/update manager ala APT, RPM ... you name it.


I still dont get why they had to push PULSE into 8.04. Ok, its not really a big deal to set up 2 config files by copying values from a wiki to get ALSA apps working again (skype...). But for a windows user that knows nothing more than point and click it can be an annoyance, however digging into the registry with regedit.exe is even as much of an annoyance.

That about sums it up yeah.


How did you guess? Yep, ATI x800 card...


Yeah, definitely. And even if it didn't have some kind of central repository to install apps in the first place (install, and it'll ask for serial/license on first run if required), an updater that would work for all your apps (not just Microsoft apps) would be a great start for sure. Updating all your software in 2 clicks is definitely nice.

to demistyfy the myths abt linux read my sig.
as u can see windows != Linux
the wat's the point in saying i can do somting easily in windows but not in linux

wen opting for an os u must learn how it works (at least tha basics)

Actually linux is not for so called noobs (atleast nw ubuntu and other few distros making it possible) its an enthusiast OS,

Actually, Linux is mainly for linux geeks and also for n00bs: n00bs do little more than web browsing and checking email, so it'll do those things just as good as any other platform really (it just costs less -- mind you most n00bs buy Dells or such, which already come with Windows, so no money saved there).

The people it isn't so much for, is everyone in-between both extremes i.e. power users and such. Everything you know about Windows (it's architecture, memory management, where stuff is at, etc) is irrelevant. All the administration/maintenance/deployment stuff you know is useless. All your debugging techniques? Useless. All them l33t commands and tricks you know don't work there. The hundreds of scripts (vbscript, jscript, powershell, autoit, etc) and batch files you wrote don't work. All your own windows apps don't work (and often aren't portable, or not easily at least), and the dev tools/toolchain is drastically different, and your knowledge of the Win32 API or the .NET framework is also useless (yes, I know about mono).

Basically, everything you know about computers, that you spent the last 20 years or so to learn (a LOT of hard work), all of a sudden is completely irrelevant and entirely useless. Yes, just re-learn EVERYTHING from scratch, but the Linux way instead (not that it will do you any good when you're working on Windows, which is still 99% of the time or so). Hopefully it doesn't take you 20 years to get there again! I know I can make anything I want happen on Windows quite easily, whereas when I boot on Linux, I suddenly become a n00b (feels like it anyhow), struggling to make stuff work (google, read man pages, mess with config files, etc). When something doesn't work, then I'm just SOL e.g. your Linux box crashes hard. Alright, just enable minidumps errrr wait! None of those, and no WinDbg! What do I do now? -- You know that feeling? Advanced & power users go from feeling confident and being able to do almost anything, to feeling nearly desperate/helpless at times, and struggling to make some basic stuff work. Can't say it's not frustrating.

Plus, non-n00bs tend to use more than just IE, and this is where Linux fails hard: the lack of any equivalents to most commercial apps, and where there are any apps to do a job, the "equivalents" are often pale imitations (no, OOo isn't MS Office, and that "The GIMP" junk surely isn't Photoshop!) They may cost less, but in most cases they also SUCK HARD. Support is another issue.

P.S. That "article" in your sig about Vista is plain wrong and has been thoroughly debunked.

Agreed there....I've tried Linux three times, ran back to Windows on all of them (latest Ubuntu 7.03 I think) for their poor quality. Numerous reasons, but all proved to either flaky parts of the OS or stupid problems that should never be (not being able to run certain "Linux" programs).

The sound drivers are a perfect illustration of why it's so bad...the weakness of open source development is illustrated well in Linux, and most of the other applications that are not tightly controlled. You have a bunch of developers, each going in their own direction. There's always the fear of not reining them in, because they are volunteers and might bolt. You end up with a complete mess which may or may not work together. And no one willing to upset the others to do what is right. For example, the sound driver platforms need to be cleaned up and standardized, as well as most of Linux past the kernel. Yet no one will standardize because of the very nature of OSS - it means some work gets tossed on the scrap heap where it belongs.

Most of what plagues Linux and will make it so it will never become a viable platform is exactly because it is OSS:
Agreed standardization needs to happen, and all efforts need to focus on making those parts work. When Linux isn't Linux (i.e. apps that work on one distro but not another), there's a problem. And beyond that, OSS development happens at the pleasure of the developers, not the market - there are no market forces (i.e. sales, profit considerations) at hand, so there is no effort or willingness to improve. Basically you get the OSS developers programming to suit themselves, and much worse, you get a bunch of religious zealots that believe that their software could never have failures (the first time I had Slackware blow out my CD-R's flash ROM and they claimed that "it could never happen" - I know full well it did because it DOA'ed the drive and flashing the ROM on it fixed it).

OSS is a complete failure as a software development process for most part in creating software and supporting it to high standards, and that is illustrated in Linux - you will never get a competitive product of high quality out of Linux, or other similarly developed OSS software where groups of people are involved. Why? The buck stops nowhere with them - no command or control.

Indeed.

Something sucks (e.g. a sound system)? Then people will fork it, creating yet another one, which will usually end up being no better. Then because it sucks in some way or another, other people will write another wrapper or abstraction layer to use it, or another layer that will let app developers use different systems transparently. This is another way the "having choice" part of Linux sucks indeed. You have a lot of choice between various systems, none of which works well, instead of one standard option that just works (no need to research which one to use either).

And how does one expect it to be fixed? Everyone's working on their own sound system instead of working together to make one not suck. OSS developers have large ego's, and since there isn't a customer paying money (and a boss to tell you what to do) for the most part, no one's forcing developers to make a system work, they just work on whatever they feel like, and as long as it works for them, then it's good enough.

And when something is broke, there's basically nothing you can do either. Complain? Oh my, the zealots and "religious" fanatics will all go nuts on you: "file a bug report", etc. Yes, file a bug report, I'll get right on that. Next thing you know, you're expected to register on some over complicated bug tracking system, where your bug will likely be ignored (stay open for years), or closed or filed under "wontfix", "not a bug", "user error" or such. And you'll usually be expected to provide loads of very technical information that most people wouldn't know where to get (backtraces, logs, versions of diferent libs, etc etc). And no, you're STILL not entitled to say anything bad! You're expected to "just submit a patch" if you're not happy with that (quite common). Yes -- fix it yourself! Nevermind your patch will likely be ignored if you actually were able to do so in the first place, and sent one in.

Seriously, just imagine the average end user trying to get an app working, being told it's all his fault, being expected to submit overly complex information to get something fixed, or being told to fix it himself. Yeah, that'll go over well...

Whereas with Windows and most commercial apps stuff normally just works, and when it doesn't, you have a # you can call or an email address you can use, where they might actually be helpful... They're businesses, and the customer is always right. They're there to make money, and they have to make it work in order to do so. If sound didn't work in Windows, you could expect a patch to be out ~instantly.


Big time. No one can test their apps on all the distros/window & sound managers/various different versions of libs coming with each distro and all that. The "linux desktop" varies just too much from one to another. For most end-users, the choice is overwhelming too (and again, often it's just a bunch of poor choices).


I completely agree again. There are a few exceptions to that (OSS apps that actually DON'T suck), but the vast majority of those are heavily financed by big corporations (e.g. Firefox, paid millions by Google).

so, this has turned into a FUD discussion I guess.
Honestly, there are problems. But standardization is happening, at least at the enterprise level distros. 'LSB' anyone? Not to forget the old POSIX stuff and filesystem hierarchy standard. The packaging systems are another problem (APT/RPM/you name it), however in my opinion those are superior to the setup.exe construct on windows. (and not every setup.exe is the same, since there are probably 1000s of installer systems out there)

However, who says with windows there are no problems is just as wrong.
And the thing about apps and drivers missing, complain at the software and hardware vendors. The only thing you can blame on linux is that the userbase is to small, so not many businesses feel like supporting it. But at the same time the userbase won't grow, cause potential users don't get their apps and drivers on linux, vicious circle.

How so?


Not really. There's still tons of different window managers, sound systems, window decorators and what not in use -- that makes for a number of permutations quickly approaching infinity. There ISN'T a standard desktop environment to test against. And it's not like every developer can (or will) test his apps on every common version of every common distro. LSB is arguably a failure, as it only targets a small percentage of distros (the RPM-based ones). POSIX and FHS are pretty old standards and initiatives that are by large insufficient (and probably holding them back in some ways).


And what's wrong with setup.exe exactly? How does it even matter all setup.exe's are not the same? As long as the app gets installed properly, and can do the inverse too, I fail to see the problem here. (unless you meant the use of repositories vs the windows way, which is nicer indeed)

As for how many installers there are, if you look at the major players, the number is quite small, from plain-old MSI installers, some installshield ones, some NSIS, a few WISE, a handful of INNO, and that's about it.

Besides, the "linux packaging mechanism" vs "software/application that is used to install software" comparison is very much an apples to oranges one. They're fundamentally different. Something closer would be comparing .DEB or .RPM files to .MSI files (they're all containers with your app's files and various other stuff in them).


I'll be first to admit Windows has it's share of issues. But at least the basics work reliably -- things like sound and video, which often don't under Linux.


Yes, don't provide hardware vendors with a stable ABI, break their existing drivers every 6 months with a new distro update, expect them to test their drivers on 30+ distros, etc. For an OS with a ~1% install base? Can we actually reasonably blame them for not bothering? Also, People don't want excuses or reasons why their mainstream hardware doesn't work, they just want it to work. If any OS can't get sound/video/power management to work right, to them, it's pretty much defective, no matter whose fault it might be. Blaming a hardware vendor for not writing drivers for a minority platform doesn't make it less unusable.

Software vendors don't see a profit to make. Linux users for the most part expect everything to be gratis and open source. Selling commercial & closed source software on Linux isn't very popular, and combine that with a tiny user base... It would cost them more to develop for it than it would earn them. It makes business sense NOT to do it. Again, can we really blame them for that?

Similarly, making money from OSS software for Linux seems to be a long standing problem. Very few Linux apps managed to establish a business model that works. Selling support alone often doesn't work at all, dual-licensing isn't very common either (and not particularly interesting, can be confusing too). Even popular/useful projects struggle with this (e.g. OpenSSL).

But yes, no user base -> no software writers, no software -> no user base. Classical catch-22.

Definitely not. Developing quality software takes significant effort. Even the small pieces that I have written take hours and it's hard for me to get them right and finished in the time frames that I have where I could write software (I have several half-finished projects sitting here). And why should I give all of it, including the keys to the castle (source) away for free?

If you go much further to more complex software, why should I (if I were a business manager) hire a team of developers and pay them good money, along with covering my own salary for something that won't give me a return? Forget for now that Linux users are cheap skates and expect to float by on everyone else's 10 large. A big reason to not mess with Linux as any since the law of life comes in - given the hours of the day a significant amount of it needs to be put towards putting food on the table. To do that takes money that Linux or OSS simply does not generate. But then again, I wouldn't doubt that most if not all Linux development comes from the independently wealthy (i.e. those that do not need to work for money), students, or college computing instructors looking for their next project to write a paper on.

The cost issue aside, let's look at some other things, assuming that Linux plays by the same rules as a OS that is not Windows but is for-profit (i.e. not under the onerous and restrictive GPL): Why should I set out to develop software for something that 1) has a 1% market share 2) might be totally broken and the effort to naught when the next distro comes out in a few months 3) Might be totally broken in source when the next dev tool comes out 4) Can't guarantee that it will work on all computers and all distros reasonably? 5) takes measurably longer to develop for because the development tools for the platform are under the same rules as crahak described and are clunky and of low quality too.

If I dedicate enough time that it requires some monetary return to pay my creditors and allow food to go on the table each day, I would be foolish to develop for Linux. And oddly enough, I should mention that those few exceptions (OSS that doesn't suck) are generally held by for-profit companies who decided to take their formerly for-profit software to OSS and severely restrict the changes that would be made by outside developers (and they take huge financial losses from it). Or they are highly financed by outside companies who expect a solid return (i.e. Firefox by Google). Not to mention, the for-profit centers that handled the software for support are still handling it, so you get quality class support out of them.

There's no way to win with Linux.

If it's one thing that bothers the crap out of me in Linux, it's the drivers. It's always the drivers.

I wanted to put Linux on my laptop many times (Puppy Linux), but every time i ended up going back to 'doze, and eventually settling with WinMe.
Why? As if the **** Trident video wasn't s***ty enough in winbloze, in linux it's even worse. I can't use hardware acceleration for something as simple as playing video, as it crashes, hangs, fills my screen with junk, or all at once. Open up a 3D app such as DosBox, works fine. Close it and everything involving even the simplest animations such as opening/closing windows stutter like crap, and need a restart of the X server to get going again. Gamma calibration does not work, and my laptop LCD looks like poop at its default settings. Power management works only when it feels like working. Great.

And me being a gamer, don't get me started on Wine. It does okay at running the most basic 2D games (that i could run in a virtual machine anyway), but fails at just about everything else.

If running a smaller distro there's loads of stuff you have to install, many times you have to install from source, which is a royal pain in the a** with all the gazillion dependencies that have more dependencies in turn.

However, i have to say that Vista is getting closer and closer to a linux distro. Aka it is about as compatible as a piece of poop, and some things that run in Vista 32 don't run in 64. Why WOW64 is f'd up so bad, beats me.

Why do i have 6GB RAM would you ask? Well, one 98SE virtual machine, one XP 32-bit, and one Vista 32-bit. Sound Forge, Photoshop CS3, XVI32 on 20-200MB files, 8-10 Explorer windows open, Opera, Winamp, Yahcrap messenger (yah for vista is crap btw).

Now where'd all the RAM go? In XP i could do all my stuff in 2GB since i only had to run one 98SE virtual machine since i didn't give a crap about Vista. But now...

DX10 is all there is to Vista. Why do i keep running it? Coz XP 64 is even worse. I wish 32-bit XP could address 6GB RAM, i remember Server 2003 could...

Developing high quality software with a great and intuitive user interface for non-trivial tasks isn't easy at all. It requires coordinated efforts from good designers, good programmers, good management, and more often than not a good motivation to get there (like being able to sell it, to make money, to put food on the table).

As much as I [profoundly] dislike Apple's products (the looks, the price, the hardware selection -- lack of it specifically, the rabid fanboys, the company and everything else), I think this is a huge part of their success. The software isn't the best by any stretch of the imagination IMO, but the user interface is top notch (as in geared towards the average end-user). That, and since they only have to support a tiny subset of available hardware out there (which they get to pick, and test/debug a lot), they can have a hardware that's well supported (no sound/video/power management issues unlike Linux). And now their machines can triple boot Mac OS X/Windows/Linux too. And having a far larger user base than Linux (and not being hell bent on everything being free and open source), there are some commercial apps for it (MS Office, Adobe products, etc).

Seriously, when your product for free and basically nobody wants of it, you know your product sucks. That reminds me of Opera, which barely had any users. Then they made it free, with ads. Still very few users. Now it's free and with no ads, and they still only have a fraction of 1% of the user base, after 12 years of trying. And obviously, it's not like there's no demand for 3rd party browsers either (or demand for browsers in general) as Firefox and Safari are doing quite well. Safari already having 10x the market share of Opera, despite being only 5 years old, and having been single-platform (a minority platform no less) for most of that time. Safari for Windows gained half as much users as Opera has in under a year... Someone at Opera doesn't seem to notice the obvious, and if they don't change anything, it might be another 12 years before they finally hit 1%. But when not only you're having a hard time giving away your product for free (Linux, free and open source), but that that people would also rather use the commercial (non-free) apps instead (Windows, Mac OS X), then you certainly have even bigger issues.

Linux might work great for certain purposes (firewalls, dirt cheap LAMP hosting for blogs and forums, etc -- mind you BSD also works great for those), but on the desktop? As much as I love Compiz Fusion, I've pretty much given up on Linux. I think I'd even consider buying a Mac instead. Not that I like them (far from it), but because I won't have to do the kind of things that I had to with Linux to try to get video/audio/power management to work... You eventually tire of wasting countless hours trying to get stuff to work. The apps seems to be more polished too (they actually have UI designers, not just programmers bolting clunky GUIs on top on command line tools) e.g. iPhoto and Aperture vs The GIMP (yuck) and and F-Spot... I know my daughters would like to have a Mac, but I'm quite happy with Windows, so I'm sticking to that.


Drivers are only a non-issue if you built your machine thinking about what parts are supported well under Linux, or that you're lucky enough that everything in your box happens to be on that list.


Even if you weren't a gamer, it would still suck. First thing I figured I'd try with WINE? Nothing special: encarta (no, wikipedia isn't a substitute). But nope, even that doesn't work. Nearly everything I looked at wouldn't work.


That's so wrong I wouldn't even know where to start... And as a non-gamer, I couldn't care less about DirectX 10 either. I had no compatibility issues with Vista so far, but it's not the x64 version (that, I'll find out about next time I get more RAM)

The numbers of MSI packaged setups are rising, but most of the time you run into setup.exe. And there are those MSI setups that are somehow bound to their setup.exe, if you want to run them alone, you have to modify the package to break that requirement.

And then the problem with different installer options, Inno for example allows you to create and read answer files for unattended installations, NSIS only has the option to install with default settings (unless other switches are scripted by the creator). Those differences pretty much kill every idea of a package system, since you have to set up different commandline arguments for those different types of installers (if you wanted them to be set up with default settings, instead of popping up the wizard for every one of the 16 programs you just installed). If everyone would use MSI, such things would certainly be easier. However, I'm still looking at whats coming out of the 7update project. Looks promising.


Well, I can't complain. Except about the ATI issue, I had a working driver version (ATI's own), then came a new version and X went *kaboom* on me. That issue got eventually resolved. So from my viewpoint I don't have that sort of problems. (may be that I didnt buy the dirt-cheap and bleeding-edge hardware and the fact that most of the system is Intel, except for the damned ATI gpu, may help too. ThinkPad T42, 3 years ago)


That's one thing I don't get either. If the target of the linux project is to be compativel with as much hardware as possible, why not give them a ABI for binary drivers? Those who really don't want it would have the choice to disable that option on building a kernel or just download a OSS-only-drivers binary kernel from their repo and live with OSS drivers exclusively.

Yes, those are a pain. However, it's fairly simple to fix them. Set ISSETUPDRIVEN to 1, or even pass it as a command line argument (e.g. something.msi ISSETUPDRIVEN=1 /qb), and it's easy to write a simple script that will edit/fix the .msi for you (use the OpenDatabase method of the WindowsInstaller.Installer object to open the MSI file much like a database, and execute your SQL queries using the OpenView method). It can be done in 10 lines or so (if one doesn't want to just use the command line parameter way), and full docs of the MSI format and everything else one might need are on MSDN.

Not all installers are alike for sure. I don't really mind MSI/IS/Inno/NSIS myself, it's just the other weird ones without any switches at all and such, that you're stuck repackaging, or resorting to autoit to click buttons and such... Those are a pain.

As long as they use something that is widely known and easy to use, be it NSIS, InstallShield or MSI, it works for me. I prefer MSIs, due to how customizable they are, and how well they integrate with windows. MSIs are particularly powerful in an AD environment where you can distribute them to certain users and groups through group policy. I think that's cool. Of course, I also love linux's approach of centralized management, although it doesn't work as well for large-scale, AD-like systems.

Depends on the AD network..

I work with some tasks as LAN admin on a portion of this AD based WAN where I see how Ubuntu has definitively become the premier solution and people bother me a lot to also install it on their personal laptops.

Enough to say that during daytime a bit above 6000 machines are online at the same intranet structure and people are growing fed up of virus/security terror and Vista hogging that prefer a complete solution provided by Ubuntu for free.

It has style, can run windows tidy in a box and OpenOffice opens both the office 2003 and office 2007 files without the need to buy any additional licenses.

Ubuntu supports AD users without need to work exclusively from a Windows XP pro machine authenticated to the domain which is sort of cool as well.

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Don't really see much need for MSI functionality but Ubuntu is on a very popular rise here since people are getting much more demanding about working with both quality and style without need to buy new corporate licenses or even worry about prices since there is no need to get bleeding edge new hardware.

Had an occasional issue with sound drivers on somewhat rare hardware but I think that an admin does need to keep learning to see how these things are solved as life moves forward. I find the previous commentary that one needs to forget 20 years of Windows to learn Linux quite wrong unless you want to voluntarily limit yourself regarding what a computer can do.

I'm talking about grown people who want it because it's looks good (Compiz, etc) and works even better for their office and simple home tasks, nowhere interested in most cases about gaming. (grown up stuff I guess..)

I first used Slackware. I then tried Ubuntu and Fedora, since Slackware had no package repository worth mentioning. In Slackware, I don't use KDE so I leave out KDE packages. First I compile a new kernel, the nVidia driver will complain about the differences in the version of GCC used and not install otherwise, then I install GNOME from GSB or Dropline, then the video driver, then configure X to the correct resolutions and refresh rates.

You'd think Ubuntu or Fedora would make this easier on my laptop.. nope. For some reason those included kernels have problems with APIC, if it isn't disabled using noapic it would randomly freeze during setup, freeze during boot or if it made it past that there would be no video at the log in screen. But noapic caused problems with not being able to use USB. There were yet more kernel parameters to get the USB fixed while keeping APIC disabled, but those then caused all power management to stop working, which means no processor scaling, LCD dimming, or battery monitoring. I can fix the APIC problem and have full functionality by compiling a kernel from vanilla sources, but I am no better off than with Slackware: compile kernel, manually install nVidia driver, configure X.

Other than that, they're all generally unstable. There are still random freezes out of nowhere, some caused by the pcspkr module when an event triggers the system speaker.. the system speaker! It goes into an infinite loop beep of death and the system has to be reset. I'm not the only one with the pcspkr problem.

Also, I still prefer the "Windows way" of installing software. I get to say what gets installed, WHERE it gets installed, every library/dependency is generally included with the software, or whether or not I want shortcuts or which sub components I want. Even Windows versions of open source software are more customizable than their Linux counter-parts. I can update software immediately as it's available, instead of scanning social sites making a BFD about how a new version of "X" is FINALLY on repository "Y". Don't get me started on compiling.. ./configure may state missing dependencies that when attempting to track down and compile said dependencies may state yet the need for further dependencies.

I'd rather buy Vista than switch to Linux.

That clearly makes you the exception then. I have yet to see a single Linux box as a desktop, anywhere, in any corporate network, ever. I find it pretty hard to believe that even...

People want Ubuntu because Compiz Fusion is shiny. But that's where the love story ends. They'll eventually be fed up of s**t not working (unless they're part of that 1% with well supported devices).

OOo might be free, but from a usability standpoint, or if you look at the speed, or features past the very basics (e.g. pivot tables) then you realize it's really only worth their asking price (also, it'll open the documents, but typically mangle the formatting) Besides, OOo and such aren't even even a reason to use Linux in the first place, as it runs on any platform.

Your only savings here, is the Windows licenses themselves (which you'd already have on a corporate network anyways, so nothing saved there even), which you're STILL paying for, but in the form of time wasted instead (unless your time is worth nothing, that is).

As for "security terror", I'm not even sure what you're saying. That's a TOTAL non-issue in a corporate environment (assuming you have competent admins). As for home users, if they go out of their way to: not patch their box, use IE, run as an admin, click on everything blindly and opening those weird attachments (like freepr0n.jpg.exe) from total strangers in their email and all that... Seriously, you can't even blame Windows for those things. That'd be like blaming the car manufacturer when you get an accident when you're not doing any maintenance on your car (no brakes left), driving above the speed limits and disregarding any road signs.

I've been there. It's all nice (the eye candy anyways), until a distro upgrade screws things up, or that you tire of hardware not working, or tire of being stuck with sub-par imitations of windows apps, or apps you want but just can't run.

redxii: I think that sums it up pretty good. That scenario looks a LOT more realistic. An awful LOT of work to just try to get the basic stuff working, crashes and all that.

Well, what if you already HAVE the computer? Is it a crime to expect it to WORK? I for one wouldn't buy a new machine just to run Linux. For me Linux on desktops = mini distros, nothing more. A way of speeding up slower hardware that doesn't need to do many tasks.



The 32-bit version is more compatible indeed, however it's slow as poop. You'll know when you switch to 64-bit. Btw, 64-bit will work just fine on 2GB RAM...

Honestly, what features in Vista do you actually use?

I guess you believe it because thats what you like to hear. I mean after all, the name of this community is "Microsoft Software Forum Network".



That crashing and noapic thing sounds more like f***d up hardware/BIOS. Since, as we agreed before, the vendors dont care about linux, especially if you buy low-cost they just dont have the time to 'waste'. And in some magazines when they test laptops/notebooks, most of the time linux has problems with power-management for example, the reason are broken ACPI tables that the Intel DSDT compiler will spit out because of the errors. (after all, they were one of those who created ACPI, so they should know whats right).

More like "because that's about the extent of things I've tried to get some boxes working". Honestly I've tried it, a lot, and I wanted to like it. And it does for sure have some nice things (Compiz Fusion -- eye candy, some nice repositories, etc).

Personally I don't tend to blame the hardware for crashes & power management problems, when it's a fairly common issue in Linux, and that them boxes run 100% fine under Windows. I think it's just yet another excuse, and it doesn't solve the problem, nor makes Linux more usable product as a desktop OS on the said boxes...

BTW, I'm not a a linux hater either, I still use it for a lot of things (actually I'm currently running vmshrink on a Linux VM/appliance). I just gave up on using it as a desktop OS.

It wasn't an overnight change. Took nearly 2 years to gain a reputation and reasons to promote this shift.

First started with a light learning process to install, teach and motivate users to use Firefox instead of Internet explorer. Since we use a http proxy to get online, the advice was using firefox configured with proxy to get on the internet and keep using IE for intranet navigation.

At the time we also started recommending or installing other alternatives to the common office tools:

Adobe Acrobat Reader --> FoxIt PDF reader (free, smaller and faster to start up)
WinRAR / WinZIP --> TugZip (free, no nags)
Nero Burning ROM --> ImgBurn / CDburnerXP (free, smaller sized)

Shift to OpenOffice proved much more difficult as OpenOffice at the time was no match for MS Office in terms of usuability so users kept using Microsoft Office 2003.

------------------------

Later, with the appearance of Office 2007 and the new default standard format of DOCX, XLSX rendered panic when people who moved to the new and shiny Office version made their documents at home and carried them over to work only to be surprised with format complications.

For some reason I never got around to succeed in installing by default the addon support for Office 2003 but it was never really something to bother much about as a very important discussion took place.

If Microsoft had decided to push this new proprietary format and this would without doubt force all thousands of working hosts on our network to also support this new format it was seen as something that would bring nothing good except for a lot of hassle to make everything work again.

OpenOffice had matured a lot and presented itself as the solution to overcome this monopoly that risked documents to be hostage of a company that could change the rules as they wish. Some feeling of revolution took place and machines with Office quickly began being replaced with OpenOffice.

This time home users were invited to install OpenOffice at the personal laptops and this ensured that documents produced by open office would be perfectly readable at home and this solution came absolutely for free. (if you don't account the man time required to proceed with these changes but we'd be left stuck doing them the same for Office 2003 / 2007 compatibility)

Lots of issues and complaints that MS office .DOC documents looked fuzzy under OpenOffice but after passing the initial lazyness to create new templates that looked good under open office this was never again an issue.

Outlook replaced with thunderbird or default webmail component from the Exchange server and only the Powerpoint replacement from OpenOffice is not as good as the MS one but still good enough for simple presentations.

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Final stone was throwed with the launch of Vista.

New laptop owners complained about a sluggy Vista system when compared to older OS's and asked to upgrade them to XP but for the most cases, the manufacturers don't even launch XP compatible drivers anymore.

Viruses didn't stop with the introduction of UAC as their surfing habits remained much of the same and also the widespread of USB based viruses ruined a lot of machines as AV's didn't really knew how to deal with this threat (our corporate AV is very old)

We also started upgrading servers to 8Gb machines with Quad core as default and even there Vista still seems awfully bloated and slow regarding the amount of resources provided so it gained no popularity amongst system admins and regular users here.

Ubuntu came as a natural evolution and eventually began being requested by users who already knew this OS or used Mac's at home.

Word spread quickly because these new users were quite proud to showcase their shiny new OS all "pimped up" and working much alike we've already been doing with the popular Office apps like OpenOffice and Firefox that a mass of users were now demanding to also have a better OS as replacement to the "boring" XP one which only brought them pain and hassle.

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No fuzz, there are always hardware issues but after configuring a machine I rarely saw any reason to spend any time with it as they are virtually perfect for intranet work where permissions are inforced and users aren't capable of ruining the machine with their traditional work habits (let them visit all the sites they wish or spread around windows viruses on pendisks that this no longer affects these machines)

I read a lot of posts about people who try multiple OS distributions and don't like but how many of them actually forced themselves to find solutions for their issues?

Most of these who even work as administrators quit but those who do endure and succeed get a good feeling of confidence, eventually learn much more and are able to work with both OS's which make them far more valuable as system/network administrators rather than being limited to just working with MS.

Don't know how other Windows based networks are doing their stuff but I do notice more companies moving onto similar procedures as it drastically reduces the need for acquiring commercial products (such as Windows, Office, AV's, etc) and allows to use the internal employed staff to completely control how their machines are expected to work.

While the new formats are proprietary, they've always been proprietary (from the very start), and every new version introduced a new version of it. And just like before, the new documents are a pain to use with the older versions. Seriously, it changed *nothing* at all to the big picture.

The Office licensing costs aren't low, that's for sure. As for the interface change, it sure takes time to adapt. I think it's a nicer interface in some ways, but when you've used the old one for over 10 years and that you knew precisely where everything was, yeah, it takes a while before you know where every advanced option is again.

As for your documents being hostage (might be fun trying to open them again in 20 years) that's completely true, like for any proprietary format. That's the case with most applications we use really. And OOXML (the standard) is absolute garbage, I'll be first to admit that.

But I think OOo is still missing an awful lot of features (most apps are pretty bad compared to Office 2003 IMO), not to mention it's "missing" some apps altogether (e.g. OneNote, Outlook, etc). It's going to be a long while before it has everything we need unfortunately.


Seriously, if Vista is slow on that, then you're certainly doing something wrong. It's just as fast as XP on a dual core with 2GB.

As for XP being "boring" yeah. A 7 year old OS is kinda stale in the eye candy department. And that's probably my biggest issue with Vista. It REALLY failed to deliver something anywhere near what Compiz Fusion does, even on a $100 vid card. Aero & Aero Glass is a sad joke. Where's my viewports? (no need to mention virtuawin or such buggy garbage) Where's all the wicked nice things like the Expo plugin? The zoom? The various shifters (ring, shift, etc -- Flip3D sucks)? etc. Vista TOTALLY failed to bring in a desktop environment anywhere near as good as Linux's, and it also failed to deliver eye candy (Aero Glass? meh. The only special thing about it is it's semi-transparent glass that looks quite awful)

What I would like personally, is Vista + Compiz Fusion, but unfortunately that'll never happen.

Linux is a great desktop environment, but not being stable on a lot of boxes, not supporting a fair amount of hardware, and not running Windows apps for which there are no equivalents, it's not really an option for a lot of people as a desktop OS.

@ Nuno Brito: I like Ubuntu. However it would be too slow for my laptop in sig. You'd say a 933MHz PIII and 512MB RAM would be enough, well, it should, but with the s***ty memory bandwidth of that ALi chipset, no.

Also, i'm a gamer, and even the simple games that my laptop can run (i mainly use it for internet and watching movies, but i do play a little something or other), have tons of issues under Wine. Some adventure games get fixed by installing the M$ Core Fonts, but...
Take something as simple as Ricochet Infinity which has no trouble running under windoze even on really old computers. In Wine, Ricochet's mouse cursor, and the ball, leave flickering trails. Now which one of the thousand blinking balls is the real one??? It's this kind of "casual" games that are played by just about everybody who has a computer. They should be supported by Wine on any kind of hardware that is able to run it under windoze.



Yes, but Office 97 documents still open in Office 2003. And if you don't use very advanced functions of Office, OOo does fine. It's been doing a fine job for me in the last two years.



Here you have your problem. With 8GB RAM and a quad core, do you consider it "normal" for Vista to be the same speed as XP on a computer with 4x less RAM and a cheap dual? I DON'T.



Sadly i have to agree with all you said here.

Actually, that's probably the break-even point in a lot of cases. I find XP runs a LOT quicker than say, Ubuntu on 256MB of RAM (especially noticeable in VMs).


You misinterpreted what I said. I said Vista runs as fast as XP on a dual core with 2GB. And I can't see it being any slower than XP on a monster box like that.

and you know what a lot of people blame if any version of Windows BSODs?
1.) it's third-party software/driver whatever.
2.) Hardware issues (memory, hdd, you name it)

So why is it an excuse when it comes to linux?

In windows' case, the drivers are always made by the OEM, not so in Linux's case. And it's sold specifically for use with Windows (that "for windows" logo on the box), with drivers for Windows on the CD that you can also get from their website (usually no Linux drivers on either). ATI never promised me that my card would work under any minority OS ever, so when it doesn't, can I really blame them? If they fail to deliver on their promises (of having Windows working fine with their stuff), then it certainly is their fault. Plus, in Windows' case, you can almost always get an updated & working (non-crashing) version of their drivers (because if they didn't have any, they'd quickly be out of business). Whereas on Linux, if the set of drivers don't work with your vid card or such, you're pretty much SOL.

Also, Microsoft (whoever is making the OS) is also doing a lot of work towards drivers not being able to bring down your box e.g. WDDM drivers (vid crashes? no problem, it'll just restart it), pushing towards a lot of driver code running in user mode, having a driver quality certification program (WHQL), centrally gathering the crash infos (the error reporting when your box BSODs) which lets them find out what drivers & apps are problematic and address those specific issues (the OEMs & software makers have access to that data) and it will even propose solutions to you... I don't see Linux doing any of this stuff to prevent crashes.

I suppose you could say it's not the Linux's kernel fault (it's not unstable) if garbage drivers available for it makes it crash a lot. Perhaps the proper thing to say is "a lot of drivers for Linux suck HARD". And there's basically no one to blame for it. The hardware makers don't necessarily want to spend money to support it nor to open all their specs and such which is understandable (it's marketed as a product for Windows too after all), and no promise is made to have it working on any other OS, and whoever wrote the drivers often has very little information to work from (especially errata and such), so it's hard for them to make good drivers. But that's mostly a blame-passing game, which doesn't solve the actual problems.


Defective hardware (bad PSU, memory errors, etc) are another story. OS is irrelevant here.

Here's something from the news today:

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38761/140/

The last paragraph resumes very well what I've mentioned that is happening were I work and not as a single isolated company.

It's not about gaming experiences or bad Pentium III with 256Mb of RAM performances. Think on work methods where thousands of machines need to work and produce documentation day after day without interruptions or aditional costs / surprises.

The logic behind this mentality is pragmatic efficiency.

If you don't notice this awareness on "common users" and only see windows as the best solution for practical work then I would really recommend getting up from your seat near the window and move outside to see why and how the rest of the world is doing all this stuff.

Please do note that I do work with windows for a somewhat long time and to be honest I'm also a bit fed up with all the MS copyright restrictions, .NET limitations and all sort of excuses to make your life plain hard.


Nope, all steps done according to the manual.
Seriously, try it for yourself and then tell me what you think, I warn in advance that you'd probably be somewhat disappointed.

Then try it on with Ubuntu as the main OS, strangely enough is that Vista ran much faster inside the virtual box emulator than it did on real hardware..

It's bloated no matter how cheap MS tries to sell it on OEM's and retail distributors.

A quad core should be put to good use, especially since I do remember working with Windows 3.0 on a 4,86Mhz CPU/640Kb RAM and now refuse to see Windows Vista using so poorly 4x~2000Mhz and 8000Mb of RAM - slow to start, slow to use and slow to close..

Also removed it from my personal laptop some time ago and see how things suddenly change for the same machine: http://nunobrito1981.blogspot.com/2008/06/...-to-ubuntu.html

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How can one mention the lack of windows alternatives for some favourite programs?

Well.. the good thing about emulation is that windows itself can still run inside a tidy virtual box to execute all your windows centric programs (not games) perfectly fine.

There is a technology (free) called "Seamless integration" that makes windows programs "jump" outside the emulator and be used alongside with linux ones.

It's not tricky to get this working too, comes as click option inside any virtual box.

There is also a somewhat long list of software alternatives to proprietary programs here:
http://whdb.com/2008/the-top-50-proprietar...e-alternatives/

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Actually, I didn't said such thing and you can double-read my replies to verify this.

I'm not a radical and would likely suggest you to keep using XP along with OpenOffice, Firefox and the other usual office tools to enjoy a good performance. You could also be minimalist and use small linux distributions but I'm not much of a fan for limited distros which don't have many people supporting them that might leave alone to solve any issues. XP has it's benefits and I only recommend changing (to better) when the conditions allow a good work experience.

At least one gigabyte of RAM and a dual core CPU let's you enjoy the best from both windows (inside tidy virtual box) and ubuntu altogether.

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You'd be incredibly surprised how things are changing my friend.

Linux is no longer seen as hostile opponent by many companies and hardware providers.

Drivers made available for linux ensure that a given hardware component can work in future OS versions across a very different range of machine architectures.

Also worth mentioning that manufacturers only need to provide the initial support (if at all) since fans will surely try to tweak and improve each ounce of performance and share the code improvements.

Question: Can you imagine a Pocket PC PDA using the USB port to burn DVD's on a portable USB DVD drive or using all the other USB devices you have in the house?
Question: Can you imagine a Win32 program running inside the same PDA without changes?

Answer: If the Pocket PC PDA is running linux then it would be possible:

On popular hardware where there isn't linux support you can even find companies that push developments on this area so that it works and this is the beauty of linux: every piece of hardware can be used if enough people get together: https://forge.betavine.net/


Ranters and zealots exist too many out there, if you want to be different you just need to enjoy the things that you can grab for your own benefit.

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You probably get amazed with what you've been missing..

Like I commented elsewhere, I can't see this make any difference. And PCs with Linux have always been available regardless.


Actually, I've been running it since SP1 came out, on a cheapo E2160 dual core CPU, and with 2 or 4GB, it runs just as good as XP does. No speed issues whatsoever.


It was also dual booting with Ubuntu for a good while actually (until about 2 weeks ago).


Yes, the "running everything in a VM" approach... No thanks. And I'm not new to this. I've been using VMware Workstation and also Server (from back when it was called GSX) for years...

On a side note, a clean install of Ubuntu 8.0.4.1 (only like 2 weeks old) already needs ~120MB of updates...

All this might be persuasive but for the fact Microsoft itself regards open-source and Linux as a competitive threat in leaked documents including the "Halloween documents". Look at the last annual shareholder report released last week too

I didn't say you said that. I meant it the general way - that people would say it'll work. And i didn't even say XP... I run Me on that laptop since XP was too dang slow. And i don't like Firefox (Opera FTW).

Also you have to admit that when you got a pretty high-end PC for gaming (see sig), you can't run anything but Windoze. However on that gaming PC you might want to use the internet, IM, and do some photo and video editing, maybe even learn a little programming, at least that's what i do.

Here's where the catch comes in. Vista x64 can run Solitaire, a web browser, Photoshop, Sound Forge and recent games. But that's about all it can do. VirtualDub (both x64 and x32) crashes and crashes and crashes, AVIPreview crashes on 80% of movies (that worked fine in XP), a few games that worked without any issues in XP crash under Vista, OllyDbg crashes under Vista, and Yahoo Messenger for Vista is a disaster. Unfortunately all alternative clients are even worse. It makes me think, why the heck did i spend this much money on a computer that can't do what i need.

XP 64-bit is even worse in terms of compatibility, and it doesn't have DX10 either. And Wine is even worse. So wtf do i run?

Now that you come to virtual machines: All fine and dandy, but i need 3D acceleration.



I seriously hope we'll get to see that day. As right now i feel like throwing my PC out the window.

was linux once seen as hostile???

was linux once seen as hostile???

While it might be something to do with Vista x64 (don't know, don't use it yet), VirtualDubMod is rock solid on Vista SP1 x86 (I've made probably close to 1000 encoding passes with it so far under Vista SP1, zero crashes/hangs/bugs so far), I've never seen avipreview crash either. I'm suspecting your problem with with your codecs and not the OS. I'm not a big user of OllyDbg, but so far no crashes. No idea about Yahoo Messenger, never used that.

crahak, you're free to express your opinions but please do take attention that I am actually focused in reporting back a bit of how people are using ubuntu today for real life work with a minimum of impact when compared to their previous work with windows alone.




If you look closer to the current linux community you'd certainly feel the difference. Where before you'd label them as "geek" it's now becoming mainstream where a wider segment of people are only interested about safely using their machines for daily work and find these sort of options as a solution (in massive numbers)

It's something that didn't happened some years ago back when the internet access wasn't so affordable or you'd be expected to know your way around computer administration.

There are a lot of pre conceived ideas about non-windows OS's and I find remarkable how young children adapt so quickly to use a linux box efficiently and quickly find solutions while 20~30 years old people often seem to get disappointed and prefer to support warez, spend money on new OS's and having to reinstall once in a while to remove malware.



What is your definition of "just as good"?

As I've said before (and now repeated), Vista is nowhere efficient given the hardware resources that it requires to work under minimally "just as good" conditions.

If you ever get to try it on a 8Gb RAM machine along with quad core (which are quite affordable in europe, don't know about other regions) you end up asking yourself why it takes so long to install, why isn't the CPU load efficiently shared and divided across CPU's and then you might turn up to test the same under ubuntu and see the difference for yourself, it's a real treat to see how CPU's are handled in linux, they've got nearly 40 years in experience inherited from the unix world and it's really amazing.




Already heard that sort of thing so many times before.. In most cases I would instantly translate this as someone who installed ubuntu as dual boot and ended getting bored with the fact that the windows boot option came in last every time the computer starts (which cause a lot of annoying presses on the down key) that eventually removed it for good as ubuntu didn't do anything good.

This would likely be a superficial type of use for most people who try it once or twice every now and then, it's not an attack nor anything alike but it's the darn 20~30